If your child has a life-threatening disease and you're desperate to read the latest research, you'll be dismayed to learn that you can't -- at least not without hugely expensive subscriptions to a bevy of specialized journals or access to a major research library.
Your dismay might turn to anger when you realize that you paid for this research. Through the National Institutes of Health alone, American taxpayers funnel more than $28 billion annually into medical research. That's leaving aside the billions more in public spending on state universities or the tax exemptions granted for gifts to private campuses.
American institutions of higher education are knowledge machines of unprecedented fecundity, but much of the knowledge they produce is locked up in high-priced scholarly journals that most people can't easily get. Citizens thus find themselves in the position of paying for research and then paying again to buy it back from academic journals whose prices have been spiraling upward. Library Journal says that U.S. journal prices rose 9% last year alone. The average chemistry-journal subscription, to cite a single egregious example, was $3,429 for one year.
But change is on the horizon. Congress has mandated that by April 7 papers arising from NIH-sponsored research -- roughly 80,000 of them a year -- be made freely available in the federal PubMed database, which can be read by anyone with an Internet connection. Alas, the new NIH policy will allow a 12-month lag between publication and posting on PubMed.
Another blow for open access to scholarly research was struck recently by Harvard's arts and sciences faculty, whose members voted to publish on the Internet for all to see -- gratis. These professors will give Harvard world-wide nonexclusive license to their work, and the university will exercise it by posting their papers. The journals won't have much choice if they want the work of Harvard professors. The faculty members will still publish in expensive journals, but the move to put the same materials on the Internet is a stake poised at the heart of a vampire that has been sucking dollars out of academic institutions for years through the ever-sharper bite of subscription prices.
When the Association of Research Libraries talks about a "serials crisis," it doesn't mean a shortage of soap operas. The ARL reports that median annual spending for journals at 101 of its big member libraries rose to nearly $6 million in 2005 from $1.5 million in 1986, far outstripping the rate of inflation -- and the rate of increase in worthwhile journals.
In 2006, the editorial board of the venerable mathematics journal Topology resigned en masse over the high subscription price charged by publisher Elsevier, a dominant player in the industry. While Elsevier had been charging institutions $1,665 for six issues of Topology, the editors later produced a similar publication (quarterly instead of bimonthly) for $570 a year. A similarly motivated mass resignation occurred at K-Theory, another math publication, whose editors also went on to found a comparable journal elsewhere.
The nonprofit Public Library of Science has been in the vanguard, petitioning for change and launching scholarly publications of its own. Its journals in such fields as biology, genetics and tropical diseases are published electronically after peer review, and the contents are promptly made available at PubMed for all to see. Instead of charging subscribers, PLoS covers its costs by charging authors from $1,250 to $2,750 per article (usually paid by their institutions and reduced or waived for authors who can't pay). One virtue of this business model is that it might discourage, however slightly, the résumé-padding practice of slicing and dicing the same findings for publication in different journals.
Of course, academic journals serve other important functions besides carrying the news. Thanks to the work of paid editors and of professor-volunteers who serve as peer reviewers of submissions, these publications act as gateways, at least theoretically upholding scholarly standards and separating the academic wheat from the chaff. And they play a key role in the way scholars achieve tenure and prestige. But such functions could be retained, albeit at lower cost, by Internet-based journals freely accessible to all, as long as editors and peer reviewers remained on the job.
Other than in the realm of life-saving medicine, why should any of this matter to nonacademics? Well, for one thing, barriers to the spread of information are bad for capitalism. The dissemination of knowledge is almost as crucial as the production of it for the creation of wealth, and knowledge (like people) can't reproduce in isolation. It's easy to scoff at the rise of Madonna studies and other risible academic excrescences, but a flood of truly important research pours from campuses every day. The infrastructure that produces this work is surely one of America's greatest competitive advantages.
In fact, open access might help to moderate some of the worst forms of academic hokum, if only by holding them up to the light of day -- and perhaps by making taxpayers, parents and college donors more careful about where they send their money. Entering the realm of delirium for a moment, one can even imagine public exposure encouraging professors in the humanities and social sciences to write in plain English.
Keeping knowledge bottled up is also bad for the world's poor; indeed, opening up the research produced on America's campuses via the Internet is probably among the most cost-effective ways of helping underdeveloped countries rise from poverty. Closer to home, open access to scholarly work via the Internet would help counteract the plague of plagiarism that the Internet itself has abetted. Anyone suspecting a scholar of such chicanery could search for a phrase or two in Google and see if somebody else's work turns up with the same unusual text string.
In the future, it's likely that a new, more flexible model will develop in which some scholarly papers, published under the banner of an online journal, will be peer-reviewed, while others will appear without any such apparatus, destined to rise or fall based on their contents and their authors' reputations. The challenge, in the coming new world of open access, will be keeping the best of the current system while jettisoning the rest. Maybe some scholar would like to study the question -- and publish his findings for all to see.
Mr. Akst is a writer in Tivoli, N.Y.